For most of the past half century the story of pop was that of waves of change as successive generations - rockers, mods, hippies, punks, ravers - dreamt into being their own revolutions. But it's hard in this age of the iPod, when every piece of music ever recorded is instantly available to everyone and when the culture is so saturated in pop in all its forms, to discern any kind of central narrative or to see where the next change could be coming from. The best of the year's music books reflect this state of affairs in their jumbled variety, and Halfway to Paradise: the Birth of British Rock (V&A Publishing £24.99) by Alwyn W Turner punches home the point that the wheel may even have turned full circle: the likes of Billy Fury - as captured in this collection of Harry Hammond's photographs from the 1950s and 60s - were more provocative and complex characters than the hopeful throwbacks who dazzle us on the X-Factor today.

Some canonical figures in rock are yet to receive the biographical treatment they no doubt think they merit - David Bowie, for instance, or Mick Jagger - and it is only with John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman (HarperCollins £25) that the Beatle gets his just desserts. It is a doorstop, exhaustively researched and particularly terrific on the singer's Liverpool childhood, if less illuminating on the music itself; it certainly didn't make me rush to listen to his and Yoko's Two Virgins again. The Clash by the Clash (Atlantic £30) is modelled on the Beatles' Anthology book, the telling of the story of the group through interviews with Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Topper Headon and Paul Simonon. Sharing a pink jacket, but this time given an appropriately glamorous satin finish, is New York Dolls: Photographs by Bob Gruen (Abrams £14.99), evocative images of the US proto-punks.

Cobain Unseen (Hodder £30), a set of snapshots of the late Nirvana singer and pictures of relics like his old cassette compilations, and Eminem's The Way I Am (Orion £20), another visual autobiography, are better suited to the coffee-table, if indeed that is the right place for two such troubled outsiders. No one would expect Cliff Richard to knock a teapot over, let alone chuck a telly out of a window, but My Life, My Way (Headline £20), his autobiography written with the assistance of Penny Junor, is a more surprisingly candid read: in it, the Peter Pan of pop reveals that he once came close to marrying TV sports presenter Sue Barker but now lives with a new 'companion', a former Roman Catholic priest. It's hard to imagine a more unfashionable figure than Cliff- with the arguable exception of Rick Wakeman, the prog goliath. His Grumpy Old Rock Star (Preface £17.99) certainly has its eye on a commercial niche. Still, it makes good on the promise on the jacket to uncover 'the truth behind the curry on stage episode'.

In north London there is a curry house with pictures in its window still trumpeting that the Darkness once ate there. Few bands have risen and fallen quite so quickly as Justin Hawkins and his gang of cod cock rockers, and it's a story affectionately told by their bassist Frankie Poullain in Dancing in the Darkness (John Blake £12.99), although to claim that the book has been edited and illustrated by 'his Polish cleaner' Ania Majchrzak is a case of pushing the joke just that bit too far again.

The Olivetti Chronicles (Bantam £20) is a collection of the late John Peel's journalism, including several of the reviews he wrote for this newspaper in the 1980s. Chief among his favourite acts - alongside the likes of Extreme Noise Terror and the Bhundu Boys - are, of course, the Fall, and their founding father, Mark E Smith has also conjured a memoir this year titled (yes, Grumpy Old Rock Star was taken already) Renegade (Viking £18.99). Rather like the band's music, it's splenetic stuff but perhaps something of an acquired taste, and the general reader will more enjoy Dave Simpson's The Fallen (Canongate £18.99), an account of the Guardian contributor's efforts to track down and interview members of the Fall sacked by Smith over the years. It sounds terribly trainspottery, but a series of very human stories emerges, and it is beaten only in the charm stakes by the work of yet another Fall fan, Simon Armitage. His beautifully written Gig(Viking £16.99) is subtitled 'the life and times of a rock-star fantasist' and charts his ambition to swap his life as a poet for that of someone whose rider doesn't involve a WH Smith stationery set; I particularly relished the account he gives of trying to come up with a name for his band, running through 100-plus possibilities - it's a game that families could play themselves at the Christmas dinner table - before his father interrupts with 'how about Midlife Crisis?'

The best rock novel this year was John Niven's Kill Your Friends (Heinemann £12.99), which does for the Britpop scene of the mid-Nineties what Brett Easton Ellis did for New York yuppiedom with American Psycho. For a very different audience there is Forever Young (Simon & Schuster £12.99), a children's picture book based on the song of that name by Bob Dylan (the book's credited author), with loving illustrations by Paul Rogers.

In 1964 Dylan wrote a subsequently forgotten suite of 23 poems inspired by Barry Feinstein's photographs of Hollywood in the Fifties and Sixties; pictures and words are brought together for the first time in Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric (Simon and Schuster, £14.99), a handsome if often baffling artefact.

Three more books that fight against categorisation: Graeme Thomson's I Shot a Man in Reno (Continuum £9.99) is a wildly cheering history of the subject of death in popular song; 17 (Beautiful £12.99) sees the KLF's founder Bill Drummond worrying about the purpose and meaning of music in our lives in this digital age; and Thousand Mile Song (Basic £15.99) is David Rothenberg's strangely wonderful investigation of the songs of humpback whales.

Finally, Alex Ross's widely garlanded The Rest is Noise (Fourth Estate £25) is arguably the year's most essential read. The New Yorker critic spins back to beyond the dawn of pop to produce an engrossing survey of classical music in the 20th century. Starting with a vivid account of a performance of Richard Strauss's Salome in 1906, he explains why Public Enemy's 'Welcome to the Terrordome' is 'the Rite of Spring of black America', and much more, hurtling towards an open-ended conclusion.